Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

So the pneumatics will be CAN, and the Power Distribution Panel, is there any way to integrate sensors like encoders into the CAN network without PWM cables in the future?

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

What if it is going to be arduino based :ahh:
probably not, but you can code arduinos in labview

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

It's not, you cannot do vision anything on a arduino

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

The NI Booth had a prototype. I almost got a picture of it. In addition to Ethernet, it has client/server USB ports & a high speed Canbus. It is running a dual core processor & a bigger FGPA. Although the guts are based on standard NI products, it is specifically designed for First. It is NI's hope that the programming tools for it will be backwards compatible to the CRIO. It looks to be novice friendly while having expansion opportunities for the teams with the resources to take advantage of them. No comment on rather or not the current CRIO's will be competition legal in 2015. Cost is predicted to be in line with the current CRIO.

A big thanks to National Instruments for continuing to support First in the way they do. I hope we get to Beta test it. (We are a java team)

PS
This is way beyond arduino.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

I'll preface this by saying that I am not a CSE, EE, or embedded engineer. This layout scares me.

Having the most failure prone component (digital sidecar) now built into the robot controller worries me. How often have shorted pins, miswired power leads, and other mistakes caused burned-out sidecars?

I sincerely hope the controller is over-engineered to a level that makes it virtually indestructable. Otherwise teams will be replacing their entire controller when someone shorts a 24V power to a 5V jumper.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

I would say that's not over-engineering - but engineering to spec :)

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

This is a heads up from the peanut gallery:

Everyone interested in the new Athena controller system needs to pay attention to crake (aka: Chris Rake) who posted directly above this post. Notice that his team number is "Athena". I can confirm that his focus to make Athena great for the FRC teams is great and I am confident that this will be a wonderful system. Along with Chris, there are many other folks at National Instruments and other supporting companies who are working hard to make this a wonderful system.

I love what I see already, and I am excited to see the full roll out in August.

Sincerely,
Andy B.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

Was this an issue teams ran into with the pre-2009 IFI controller (which was also fully integrated)? You're absolutely correct that the I/O circuit design needs to have shorting, overvoltage, and inversion protections built in to avoid failures in our swarf-heavy and miswire-prone robots. The digital sidecar has indeed been problematic for a lot of teams (mine included) but I've not heard of a team damaging one of the cRio modules--we had an analog bumper get pretty hot and give incorrect results this year when we shorted the 5V and GND, but after getting rid of the short it worked again. I'm pretty confident that NI knows about these concerns and is capable of designing in appropriate protections for the Athena I/O.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

I expect that since the Athena is going to be around the same price as the crio, it should be about as robust as the crio. The digital sidecar is not meant to be put on robots like we use. I think NI realizes that our equipment can take a beating and will probably take that into account.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

CAN Talons may just get us to make the switch. Cool stuff.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

There was a lot of things that made me like CAN, but the integrity of jaguars made us stray away from them. Having 8 working victors at the end of a season was more appealing than a (literal) pile of dead jaguars.
CAN talons could bring back my interest in CAN, I'm anxious to see what they come up with.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

Most of the encoders used on FRC robots are quadrature encoders, which means they have four wires. They're usually four individual wires twisted together or a four wire ribbon cable, they're not really pwm wires. The way the digital sidecar is set up, you need to use three wire connectors, which is really inconvenient, but the new control system might have dedicated encoder inputs, which would be great.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

I'm not sure I understand this statement. The DSC was made specifically for FRC robots.

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

Thanks Andy - As Ray announced at opening ceremonies this system is a result of collaboration between numerous companies and organizations - all of whom are dedicated to making this the best possible system for this program.

I also have to ask for some forgiveness from the forum. There are a lot of questions, and some of these may have to go unanswered for the time being. But folks won't have to wait for long - August will be here very soon!

Re: NI releasing/designing new controller for FRC
 

6mm lugs for the main power terminals on the next-gen PDB. WHY???